The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Also bewildering is the mythology connected with the island; in particular the birth of Apollo whose mother, Leto, flying from the wrath of Hera, finally took refuge here – or, if not here, in Rhenia hard-by which, like Delos, has been identified with Ortygia (Quail Island) – a name that keeps turning up in Greece and Sicily. ‘Then Leto clasped a palm tree in her arms’ (thus the Homeric hymn) ‘pressed the soft ground with her knees, and the earth beneath her smiled and the child leaped into the light. All the goddesses cried out with joy. Then, O Phoebus, the goddesses washed thee in sweet water, limpid and pure, and they gave thee for swaddling clothes a white veil of tissue, light and fresh, which they tied with a golden girdle.’

  It is unsatisfactory really, for the attributes of Apollo proliferate to such a degree that you can hardly feel proprietary about him in Delos, however much you may sympathize with poor Leto. He was an all-purpose god. One connects him with the powers of divination, and therefore, usually with Delphi; yet he was also the god of light par excellence, and when Delos was chosen (it means ‘the Brilliant’) as a name to replace Ortygia, it was to suggest that the god’s burning ray had fallen upon the island. Then, as if to irritate us, the scholars say that there was a sacred grove called Ortygia near Ephesus, and in some versions of the legend his birth occurred there … At any rate he was a sun-god, though he was not actually the sun himself – that was Helios. Phoebus = brilliant, Xanthus = fair, Chrysosomes = golden-locked – these epithets justify his marvellous youthful looks in all sculptures connected with his name. There was perhaps a vein of introspection and sadness in him too for ‘he delighted in high places, the frowning peaks of high mountains, wave-lapped beetling promontories’. This was part of the prophetic side of his protean nature – after all, he was a love-child.

  His light ripened the fruits of the earth, and in Delos the first crops used to be dedicated to him; they are still dedicated, though nowadays to the Virgin or the village saint. (You will find offerings of first fruits, and of oil for the lamp, at every tiny wayside shrine in Greece today.) But Apollo was as good as any modern saint – he destroyed both mice and locusts when they endangered the crops. Strangely enough, even today incursions of locusts are blown over from the African deserts, though not on any great scale. I have seen two such small invasions, one in Rhodes, which cost several acres of burned grass to control and caused some alarm. Just how Apollo went about their destruction in default of kerosene oil is not recorded in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, that indispensable work of reference, in which the enumeration of his gifts takes up several pages of close print.

  Little Mount Cynthus, so charming by the light of the moon, seems artificial by daylight – as if it had been fashioned by man for some mysterious purpose as yet unknown.

  As for the lake, the less said the better, for it has dried up; though the guardian once told me that after the rare winter rain, one can hear the croak of green tree frogs in the ancient cisterns. The lizards are huge, and vivid emerald, and strut and scuttle about the stones as if they owned them. The sacred birth took place on the north side of Cynthus under a spreading date palm; immediately, the barren land burst forth in springs, flowers and fruit, and the sacred swans wheeled across the sacred lake. Was a date palm such a rarity in ancient Greece, one wonders when one reads that after this episode the palm became sacred to Apollo? It is true that Odysseus compares the beauty of Nausicaa to ‘a young palm tree which I saw when I was in Delos, growing close to the altar of Apollo’. The sacred geese have also departed today.

  The usual landing for the Mykonos visitor is the sacred port. This is a trifle to the north of what is known as the ancient commercial harbour, whose amenities are picked out in clear detail by the ruins of warehouses, granaries and quays. The old site of the Apollo Temple lies two hundred yards inland from the little jetty, and shoulders the old agora of the Competaliastes which is nearer to the old port. The layout of the square is authoritative, and it must have had great atmosphere when all the statues were upright. Among these was the giant statue of Apollo which was of Naxian provenance, and must have been accounted a technological wonder, for the inscription on its base announced: ‘I am of the same marble, both statue and base.’ Has one a right to feel there is something a little nouveau riche about the sentiment? Was the statue offered by the Bankers’ Guild of Naxos? At any rate, ruin has overtaken it, along with everything else. It has been hacked to pieces; one chunk lies near the temple of Artemis, a foot is in London, a hand in the Museum of Delos. ‘It needs an effort of the imagination to reconstruct the sanctuary as it once was,’ says a modern writer; it does indeed, especially the soaring bronze palm tree which overshadowed the huge figure of the god.

  If you find something unsatisfactory about the relics and associations of the principal hero-god of the place, your sense of wonder and delight will come back if you go directly north from the site of the sacred lake to the little group of lean Mycenean lions, which pose themselves for a leap in the harsh glare of the sun. They have an archaic style that suggests they have been crossed with a Persian cheetah, and though their numbers have been depleted by time and vandalism (there were once nine), five of them still remain in a row, poised and silently snarling, to greet the approaching visitor. At once the poetry and the harmony of the place seem restored, and you forget the guilds of bankers that perhaps commissioned them to be carved – for they are made of Naxian marble, like the statue of the god.

  A vague unrest haunts one during the daylight hours in Delos – you will notice that I exempt the night. Its source is the endless search for a clue which will illuminate the intimate connection that obviously existed between treasure and worship in the ancient world – between the counting house and the sacred temple in whose shadow it operated. Perhaps somewhere there is a treatise on ancient Greek banking and its theory of values, which throws some light upon this superstitious linking of the material with the supernatural. Even modern cultures show traces of the same link, and I suppose that the hoarding instinct is as old as history, flowing through all the ancient epochs – Stone, Bronze, Iron – up to the Middle Ages, when it crystallized into the sacerdotal banking houses of the Templars and thence on to John Company and Chase Manhattan, so to speak. It is not invidious to see the temple enclosure of a sacred town like Delphi or Delos as a sort of spiritual dynamo, generating forces to ward off evil influence, bad luck, even the ever-present thieving hands which waited to pounce upon unguarded treasure.

  Perhaps, for cyclopean man, the protecting gods were trees, the sacred groves and enclosures which held a magic to ward off evil spirits. But what could his treasure have been; what was he afraid would be stolen – the secret of fire perhaps? To push imagination further, I think the trees were followed by the herms, those sculptured heads on tall columns which watched over crossroads of the cities and the private courtyards of families, sharing their duties with the lares and penates. After that, magic expressed itself in the statue primarily as a representation of the deity, and then its cocoon, the temple.

  In any case, there must have been a very active belief that the temple gods were well disposed to material gain; they brought good luck and a following wind to one’s enterprises, on condition that they had their cut in precious stones, statuary, or plate. In this sense, the modern Americans, with their frank avowal that material gain is holy, are very like the ancient Greeks – who must, like the modern peasant in Greece, have promised the local saint (then it was Apollo) a gold or bronze palm-tree if he would kindly help the fleet arrive safely back from Syria. The ancient, direct superstition is more disguised in modern times, but still there. It is not true, however, that the annual reports of the bigger banks in the USA begin: ‘In the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen. Gentlemen, as the poet Keats has written: “Beauty is loot, loot Beauty …”’ There is not a word of truth in this.

  In Delos at midday, the dry, island wind parches lips and heart, shivers the brown grass, and whispers among the ruin
s. Outside the sacred port, the Meltemi has started to stir up the channel until it boils white like milk. You will have to wait in patience for it to falter and fall, as it will with the early dusk, before taking your ship for Mykonos. And when evening comes, the strange Pharaonic bronze and green lights seem to play about the site of the ancient Serapeion, reminding one, not of Cycladean blue and white, but of the exhausted colours of the Nile valley. There is hardly a god who did not plant himself here, introduced by the traders and mariners of the whole Middle Orient. They were encouraged to make themselves feel entirely at home – it was good for trade; and a puissant, magical city with its ‘free port’ facilities encouraged the establishment of more permanent citizens – those who polished and set jewels or worked metals or carved stone. There was plenty of work for all. Only that little question of the inadequate harbour still troubles me.

  When you walk here at dusk, waiting for the first blush of the rosy-bronze moon across the water, what a vast melancholy is distilled by this great ossuary, the broken whiteness of all this bundled and smashed stone! Everywhere the eye turns there is desolation; nothing whole, nothing erect, nothing complete. The curses of genius and of history have joined forces here to wreak their vengeance on everything to do with historical man – that is to say, man the predator, commercial man! For the disposition which the archaeologists have accredited to the various deities and their precincts suggests the same sort of haphazard muddle that Pausanias describes in the Acropolis – an ignoble jumble of superstitious objects, dirty wax, smashed bibelots, dusty feathers, rusty armour, broken arrows – everything overlooked, thrown about, forgotten, almost forfeiting any claim to historical significance. I am sure that had he ‘done’ Delos in the same way, Pausanias would have produced something like his account of the Acropolis of Athens. Yet … I am sorry that in Delos there is not a plaster model, made by an architect, to guide one’s steps; for, thanks to the patient work of the French over so many years, almost everything about the huge site and its history is known, and its location pin-pointed.

  But the melancholy remains. A whole brief civilization was swallowed up here, battered to pieces. Only the lean archaic lions and the Dionysian nook with its frieze and phalluses remain, to remind one that in spite of everything the island was once full of primal echoes and the astounding phosphorescence of Apollonian light.

  There is a further mystery – at least for me – in the fact that twice the natural magic of the island was reinforced by a formal act of lustration, and a removal of anything which might connect it with death (the sepulchres, for example) and, by the same token, with life. Birth and death were officially banished from the place, and Rhenia across the water absorbed both the dead and those about to give birth. There must have been some profound reason for endowing Delos with this sort of immortality out of time. I have not been able to come upon a satisfactory explanation. Was it merely a commercial decision – to reinforce the magic of the site? The two lustrations are historically separated by more than a century. There must have been, surely, some more fundamental reason behind it. Perhaps the decision was made, for example, because of some great sin committed there. It could have been intended to be expiatory or generative of renewed power. The guide books announce this sort of thing without a tremor – yet the mere fact is obviously momentous. What does it really mean? We do not know.

  It was the sage Peisistratus, when he was tyrant in Athens, who first decided to purify the holy birth-spot of Apollo. This was in 543 BC. The second time the lustration was repeated and the magic intensified was in 426 BC. At the same time a new law was promulgated forbidding all births and all deaths on the island – a weird kind of immortality indeed! It is impossible to believe that the reason was purely commercial, though there is no doubt of the tremendous economic power of this small harbourless hole of a place. The whole Levant traded here and presumably banked here, under the tutelary protection of the sacred shrines. One must, I suppose, imagine the situation was something like that of the power of the modern Swiss banking system, which depends on money transferred under guarantee of secrecy from outside. All those immense fortunes of which we read must exist entirely on trust; they cannot be acknowledged on paper because they technically do not exist. If tomorrow a Swiss bank decided to pinch the entire forture of – name any millionaire – there would be no legal redress for him. Yet the banks have never done such a thing and never will … The whole fragile system rests upon a simple say-so. Delos must have had something of this commercial magic about it in antiquity.

  However, there is no denying history; time erodes everything. Delos went downhill, its magic wilted and waned. We see it now very much as Pausanias would have done; in his day it was quite uninhabited, save for the guardians of the sacred temple. But the temple itself was no longer in business; the god was dead, along with all the others, and the world had moved off along a new vector. Nothing could reverse this drift. Most humiliating of all – it is Philostratus who records the fact – when Athens decided to sell off the place in a job lot, she could not find a buyer!

  Salute the headless Isis on your way up the holy hillock; every faith and every creed was welcomed here. Apparently there are even traces of a small late synagogue among the other ruins. You will have the queerest feeling of sadness as your boat levels off and begins to cross the two or three sea miles which separate it from Mykonos – where all is shining calm and silence, and where the quiet windmills with their grey sails turn all the time; for never for a second does the wind let up. There on the harbour front, drinking or eating, your thoughts shift from time to time to that smudge against the sky – Delos. A mystery remains, a disquieting echo. In the tiny museum, I saw a Christian stele commemorating the death of a girl. The inscription read ‘Ego dormio sed cor meum vigilat’.

  This is perhaps the place to mention the name of an old man, much revered in his time, who has now disappeared from the island scene. He was an old peasant, George Polykandriotis, whom I encountered on the sea-front and who informed me that he had started work with the French Institute, aiding them in their earliest digs on Delos. Later he became familiar with the pottery and vase forms, and then discovered in himself the gift of restoring pottery. ‘There is hardly a vase here or in Delos which I have not reassembled myself,’ he told me. He had worked right into his old age, and now his sight had failed, which caused him great sadness. His old hands seemed still to have traces of the clay dust which had come from years of handling these precious shards and piecing them back together – as if they had gathered some of the soft, chalky bloom which is such a feature of the vases themselves. It is to this old helper that the Athens Archaeological Institute dedicated its twenty-first volume on the Delos finds – a fitting tribute.

  In the central cluster of the Cyclades, the distance between the islands is so short that you navigate more by the eyes than by the stars. You are seldom without a visible landfall, except in winter; you move from smudge to smudge on a sea forever brushed by harmonious winds, which can make wires sing out and cordage groan, or treat a large passenger ship as a wind-tunnel, but which usually have the grace to die with the sun during the Etesian season. After hot days, travel by night is delicious under the canopy of stars of every size. The hush of the prow crunching its way through the lazy water makes you think of the night as a great Aeolian harp of the intuition, plucked by these sleep-echoing sounds. Then, suddenly, a signal goes forth; the ship booms and roars like a bull when it rounds some dark point, and a frail network of lights tells you that you are nearing a new harbour. This grave maroon shakes the heart as if it were the voice of Judgment itself.

  It is time to discuss the Virgin of Tinos and her native island, for they form an imaginative link with Delos, today serving as the great Lourdes of modern Greece. The wonder-working Panaghia is modern, in the sense that she dates from the revolution of 1822, but – attesting once more the perenniality of things Greek – the spring over which her chapel was built had been famous for its cures ce
nturies before. Her two great festivals are, if anything, rather more impressive than the one at Lourdes because of their exotic island setting, and because of the strange mixture of races and clans who bring their sick here to be healed. Even Central European gypsies manage somehow to come – so widely spread throughout the Balkans is the belief in the Virgin.

  I had intended, after a stay in Mykonos, to return to Athens by the lazy little island steamer of the time, but it was nearly the Festival of the Tiniotissa and I decided to spend a night on the island during the celebrations. A Greek ceremony of this nature has an inevitable cheerfulness which breaks through the gloom and anxiety generated by so many sick people gathered together in one place – some in extremis, one would suppose. It has a solemnity that never becomes anxiety-sodden and depressing. The event, of course, brings great trade, prosperity and tourism to the island and hordes of hucksters, jugglers and camp followers during this brief period swarm into the capital, eager to make a little money. They sell everything, from sweets and straw hats to lucky charms and live pigeons. Probably the ancient Aesculapia also honoured this secular side of things, and outside the sacred precincts, where the priests performed their work of consecration, a whole short-lived city sprang up with flags, coloured bunting, and more practical things, for which exhausted travellers would give money readily – pure drinking water, lemon juice against flies and sea-sickness, and so on.